there was a mini-conference at penn yesterday at which i presented some of my results -- the last major thing before i leave this place on monday for my summer of fretting and anxiety. the talk went well, and i was settling down to enjoy the rest of the proceedings when some effing jerk of a doctor came over to me and started asking a whole bunch of questions obviously designed to expose the ignorance he must have thought i had. while it is true that many people nowadays are doing fmri work with no clue of the limitations of the methodology, i'm well beyond being one of those people, and seriously resented the implication. i've mentioned recently that respect is the currency of academia, and i feel that for all the suffering i've been through to get here i should be given a little bit more of it, absence of letters after my name notwithstanding.

the after-conference was great -- drinks at la terrasse, apparently known to all but me as LT, thus reestablishing one of the more peculiar motifs in my life. dr. sb got a bit tipsy and started bitching about lab members present and gone. our lab has a very unusual history -- our PI used to be the famous martin orne, who did a lot of the pioneering (and highly controversial) research on hypnosis and false memory. events in the 70s and 80s leading eventually to the advisor's takeover apparently involve deceit and betrayal worthy of the great soap operas, but all that history is highly secret, and guarded closely by mysterious elderly people in our lab who are still on the payroll even though they don't do any work. it's all highly thrilling, and every once in a while i get a small tidbit, which i squirrel away in memory for the day i publish my shocking expose. incid: someone should print out this entry so that if i'm found dead in a gutter somewhere one of these days justice can be sought.

we had more beer. R(s)ODPFBSE appeared, then happy hour ended and we decided we would much rather drink jared's tequila than buy $6 beers. plus: he now has molds for making ice shot glasses, which are so awesome i almost feel i shouldn't be writing about them. the housemate ended up tagging along, and (weird)nick and laura and christian. and we stayed out till pretty late, and ended up outside the cvs singing irish songs at 2 in the morning and somehow not being killed.